Power Wars Blog by Charlie Savage

Response to Robert Merry

A few weeks ago, the website of The American Conservative magazine published a lengthy article by its brief-tenured and outgoing editor, Robert W. Merry, carrying the sober and understated headline “The Nunes Memo and the Death of American Journalism.” Why was journalism dead? Because of me! More specifically, because when the famous memo prepared at the direction of House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes was released, I annotated it in a way that Merry did not like and saw as exemplifying a broader abandonment of good old fashioned journalistic values.

Merry’s critique inadvertently displayed cluelessness about several matters, such as when he couldn’t understand the relevance (“out of the blue”) of flagging the memo’s tarring of Rod Rosenstein and its implications for the Mueller investigation, suggesting that Merry was completely unaware of the campaign then overtly underway to use the rollout of the memo to set Trump up to fire Rosenstein.

But Merry’s primary complaint was about annotations that flagged specific factual claims in the Nunes Memo that Democrats and law enforcement officials who had read the same underlying FISA materials contested as inaccurate or misleading. (Recall the context that Republicans had refused to put out the official Democratic rebuttal memo at the same time they made the Nunes Memo public.) Merry maintained that telling readers that certain parts were disputed was inappropriate, or as he put it, amounted to “ostentatiously answering serious allegations with counter-speculation by way of spreading confusion and thus undermining the allegations.”

His rationale was foggy. In some places, he seemed to recognize that I was reporting out a dispute that had two sides — drawing on confidential conversations with sources and citing a detailed statement issued that same day by Adam Schiff — but he maintained that what a real journalist would have done was just present the Nunes Memo’s allegations to readers as uncontested fact, like Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal opinion pages. (No, really!) In other places, he seemed not to recognize where the critique was coming from, bizarrely accusing me of merely speculating by myself, without any evidence, that certain claims in the Nunes Memo might be contestable.

Anyway, this was self-evidently a bad take from top to bottom, so I basically ignored it other than snarking on Twitter about one particularly dumb part.

🙄THE OUTSIDE SCOOPFeb 5: Nunes/Gowdy admit FISA application DID tell court that Steele research was politically motivated contrary to impression created by their memo Feb 6: @robertwmerry in @amconmag declares flagging that key memo line as disputed was the death of journalism pic.twitter.com/MiZ1L15Mdt

That unleashed a second confused screed. Neither of them appear to have had any impact — not even Russian bots are retweeting them, which is quite an accomplishment for pro-Nunes Memo pieces — but still, since these things live on forever in Google search, here is my brief rebuttal to it:

Charlie Savage of NYT thinks he's been vindicated by the Democratic rebuttal to the Nunes memo. He hasn't. Bob Merry lays it down: https://t.co/jW6P3Fpptb

1/ No, @amconmag, tell Merry the point is that his original piece, putting forward the risible thesis that it was bad journalism to flag which factual claims in the Nunes Memo were contested by Dems/law enforcement officials familiar with the underlying FISA materials,

2/ justified that bad take by accusing me of speculating without evidence that various specific parts might be problematic. In fact, as was obvious to everyone but him at the time but as the belated unveiling of the 2nd memo underscores, I was accurately reporting out the dispute

3/ so readers were informed when it mattered, not weeks later when the news cycle had already moved on to guns. To the extent that he is backing away from his initial description of what would "seriously discredit" the Nunes Memo and maintains that "questions remain,"

4/ that’s why I'm petitioning the court to unseal the underlying materials, contra the particularly dumb attached point. In sum, he put forward a bad take on journalism while displaying confusion about the specific facts, which should, but probably won't, make him re-evaluate. pic.twitter.com/EWk5CtAZba

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